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I think the issue is that making games- especially big, prizewinning, AAA games- is inherently an artistic endeavor. And that attracts artist-types who are the most likely to be woke. Sure, the coders, testers, QA folks, etc might be chuds, but the ones making the creative decisions are highly susceptible to wokeness. It's not even about making money, they're just doing what they think is right. It's the same reason that Hollywood movies are so woke.
On the other hand, it kind of doesn't matter. There's so many games already made that no human can play them all in a lifetime. The technology has plateued so that new ones aren't any better than old ones- in fact with the RAM and GPU shortage, newer computers might actually be worse than old ones. We can easily immerse ourselves in old chud-made entertainment forever.
And it kind of does, because the big budget games with the best graphics etc are the ones who don't dare to break with wokeism. If you have an absurdly expensive GPU, you want the most demanding games to be satisfying, to justify your purchase. Sure, there are more games than you could ever finish, but most of them aren't AAA.
I think that this sort of person- "I spent the maximum money for the latest and greatest GPU, and therefore I will buy the latest AAA games, regardless of how stupid they are-" is going to becoming a vanishingly rare part of the market. See also: "Guy who buys a new car every year" and "Guy who goes to Vegas every year."
It certainly used to be true that a better gaming system improved the quality of the rendered image, or improved frame rates to give a marginal competitive advantage (tried playing PowerPoint Quake? It's hard to hit enemies playing a slide show).
That said, I think the days of marginal GPU improvements improving the experience ended at least a decade ago. Yes, real-time ray tracing looks amazing, but honestly modern games aren't limited by graphics, but by mechanics and storytelling. Nintendo has known this for a while. My favorite games are ones that maximize novel, fun gameplay, not push triangles (Factorio, for example). But maybe there's a factor of me getting older and having nostalgia for older sorts of games. Heck, Roller Coaster Tycoon still manages to be a classic, despite being written in x86 assembly for a machine that probably underperforms some toasters today.
Honestly I think Hollywood has a version of the same pox: modern VFX makes it possible to realistically show pretty much anything. Effects alone no longer sell movies, and that puts more focus on the writing and directing.
You need a very good GPU to run new, graphically intensive games at the display's native 4K resolution (and higher). My next monitor will be a 5k2k one (11 million pixels whereas 4k is 8.3 million pixels).
Maybe it's that I still have older hardware, but the step change from 1080p to 4k seems a lot smaller than the previous generation jump from TV or DVD resolutions to 1080p. Do you find that playing at 4k native resolution dramatically improves the gaming experience? Again, it might be a selection bias that I've been playing fewer cutting-edge games.
Do you mind if I ask what titles you're playing?
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